Trial at hand for former torture chief

Vann Nath, a former prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, stands beside a painting of himself and other prisoners being led into the S21 torture centre. Jared Ferrie / The National

The National
Jared Ferrie, Foreign Correspondent
February 13. 2009

PHNOM PENH // Vann Nath has rendered his country’s painful history in brush strokes. One of a handful of survivors of a prison where about 17,000 people were tortured, Mr Nath documented the year he spent there in a series of oil paintings titled Endurance.

On Tuesday, three decades after Vietnamese troops ousted the Khmer Rouge, the man who ran the S21 torture centre goes on trial at an international war crimes tribunal in Cambodia’s capital.

Kong Keach Eav, better known as “Duch”, faces charges of crimes against humanity. He is the first of five Khmer Rouge leaders to be tried for their roles in the regime that killed as many as two million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979.

At the preliminary hearing on Tuesday, judges will decide on the nature of participation in the trial of “civil parties”, or victims who have asked to be included in the proceedings. Court officials said Duch’s trial will continue in March, although an exact date has yet to be announced.

For Mr Nath the trial comes late, but better than never.

“The time it has taken is very long and it makes me feel tired of waiting,” he said. “If we can get the trial as soon as possible it is the best thing.”

Mr Nath was tortured before entering S21, but not while he was at the prison. His art saved his life.

“That’s the only reason they kept me alive – because I could do the painting,” he said.

When his captors discovered he was an artist, they put him to work painting portraits and sculpting busts of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader who died in April 1998 in his stronghold in western Cambodia.

Every day was a struggle to please the overseers of the prison and Mr Nath lived in constant fear he would be tortured.

“I never had any hope that I would survive there,” he said. “The only way was to try to work hard to please all the cadre so they would let us stay alive and work for them.”

Lawyers have not publicly outlined their cases in detail, but the prosecution is likely to point to the central role that S21 played as the headquarters of the Khmer Rouge’s security network, which executed about 500,000 people. (Many more died of starvation and sickness in labour camps.)

In her book When the War was over, Elizabeth Becker wrote that Duch rose to become “one of the half dozen most important leaders in the country” as his S21 facility became “the nerve centre of the system of terror” that extended to torture prisons throughout the country.

According to Ms Becker, a former Washington Post reporter and one of only two journalists to interview Pol Pot, Duch answered only to Pol Pot and a few other high-ranking Khmer Rouge leaders who began to kill suspected enemies within their ranks in Stalinist-like purges.

The Khmer Rouge wanted to turn Cambodia into an agricultural utopia, but when they failed, leaders looked for enemies inside the party that could be blamed for undermining the revolution.

Duch led the witch-hunt. He and his torturers extracted false confessions from party officials and mapped out elaborate spy networks that did not exist. And they documented their work in meticulous detail, producing hundreds of thousands of pages of confessions and photographs of victims.

As head of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, Youk Chhang has spent 12 years collecting those and other records of Khmer Rouge atrocities. Many documents from the centre have been submitted as evidence to the tribunal.

Despite years of research into S21, Mr Chhang said mysteries remain.

“I’m hoping that the hearing will allow us to understand what happened there. Right now we just don’t know,” he said.

As more material is unearthed, more questions arise. For example, Mr Chhang recently tracked down the only known footage of S21. Vietnamese soldiers filmed it when they liberated Phnom Penh and it shows four children that were living at the prison.

The identities of the children are unknown, as are the reasons they were kept alive, said Mr Chhang.

While being sent to S21 meant almost certain death, records also show that Duch decided to release 177 prisoners.

“I want to know why he released them,” Mr Chhang said. “Is there any act of humanity in such horrible conditions?”

During his nine years of detention, Duch has kept silent about what happened at S21 and what his role was, Mr Chhang said.

Mr Nath said when he was detained at S21, he did not know Duch was sending prisoners who survived torture to be executed at the Killing Fields on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. He thought prisoners were being sent to work camps.

“Back then the man that ran S21 seemed to be a smart man, an intellectual man,” Mr Nath said. “After 1979 when we discovered that so many crimes had been committed, so many people had been killed, I realised he was a very cruel man, killing people without any sympathy.”

David Chandler, a former US diplomat turned-Cambodia historian, said Duch was complying with orders from superiors.

“There is no way he could have been acting on his own,” said Mr Chandler, who is the author of Voices from S21 and now teaches at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

“I think he was well educated, smart and completely dedicated to the Communist Party and to his macabre work,” he said. “Cruelty has nothing to do with it, and there was no room at S21 for compassion.”

Before S21 was taken over by the Khmer Rouge it was a school. These days it is a museum where tourists stroll sombrely through rooms filled with instruments of torture and thousands of black and white photos of prisoners. Some stare at the camera wide-eyed in terror, while others can barely open their eyes from the beatings they have received from torturers answering to Duch.

Now a born-again Christian, the 67-year-old former head of S21 is the only one among the five suspects to confess his role in carrying out purges.

Mr Nath said he was reserving judgement on whether Duch is sincere in his conversion to Christianity, or whether he regrets the atrocities he committed.

“I just have to wait until the court makes verdict and then I will have to decide whether he is a good man now or a bad man,” he said.

If found guilty, Duch and the other former Khmer Rouge leaders face a maximum sentence of life in prison and a minimum sentence of five years imprisonment.